avalanche

Worth it for me. I have the freedom of hosting as many domains, accounts, and aliases but no extra charges. If you only have yourself, simple needs, and care less about holding your own data, maybe it is not worth it. It all depends.
I also would not say it is “easy”. It is if you already know what to do, but you can say that about a lot of things. And mailcow makes it all “easier”, but when something breaks, it is often not at the best time to figure things out.
I get less spam on this setup then I did with Google. I owe much of that to greylisting, which is very effective, but not everyone’s cup of tea.
My biggest problem over the years is delivery failure due to various written and unwritten rules. Some people here will say you just have to have a clean IP, but it is NOT that simple when dealing with Google and MS. In the end, I use Sendgrid for my outgoing. We send so little mail, we will always be in their free tier. I’d rather not use them, but it is better than giving up on selfhosting for me.
And finally, if you are not going to bake in backup and recovery into your plans, don’t bother. Make that aspect of your buildout equally important.

I’m really liking mkdocs-material. Crazy lightweight. Very safe. And it looks nice.
https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/

Not the OP, but from a privacy perspective, I would pick Signal over Telegram. They both have some issues, but Telegram is not E2EE by default and is a bit if a pain to use E2EE consistently. And yet, Telegram claims to be super secure, etc. There are a bunch of other issues there as well. I’m not saying Signal is the best privacy tool out there. But, between the two, I trust Telegram a lot less.